Saturday, 24 September 2016

Omelette Exploration 6: The Masala Omelette

As regular readers will know, I am always interested in seeing and trying out new approaches to omelette making. Being a regular reader of 'The Guardian' newspaper which has scores of recipes, sometimes every day of the week, but particularly on Saturdays, it is unsurprising that I have drawn inspiration from it. Today's recipe comes from Vivek Singh and featured in the newspaper in October 2015:

This was the final part of a four-part series in which celebrity chef Nigel Slater gathered various breakfast recipes. I will leave you to read the original article; fortunately the masala omelette is the first recipe in that list. Naturally I put it to the test. While this was put forward as a breakfast menu as Singh points out, it can be a dish for any time of the day and as with the bliny omelettes considered last month, it can be eaten cold.

The method of cooking is in line with the basics that I have outlined throughout. What I would caution is keeping the quantity of spice under control and using fresh rather than dried ingredients as much as possible. I have made this dish and ended up with a rather 'arid' omelette, almost too strong in flavour to eat comfortably. That may be because I have a British palate and as noted before and not keen on tasting salt in my dishes.

I do think this is not really an omelette to be eaten on its own or unfilled and I would certainly encourage you to present it with a vegetable filling or indeed as an accompaniment outside the omelette. Singh advises 'asparagus, olives, spinach or artichokes' in this role - are all favourite vegetables of mine and have a moistness which can temper the rather arid nature of this particular omelette. I think I will come back to this approach to omelettes but in future will scale down the spices and will make sure that I have a lot more greens either to put in the omelette or alongside it.